If you are into theatre, here’s a tip for you: The „theater denkplural“ will perform the play „Apokalyptische Elendstouristen“ at the U of Mainz next week.The play employs lots of medial events, among them a news jingle by your humble blogger :)So if you have time on 29.06 / 30.06 / 01.07 at 8pm in P1 at the University of Mainz, you can see and hear for yourself.Admission is 5€/3€.

To whet your appetite, here’s the poster for the play (click for larger version):

And to make you drool for anticipation, the track in question is the first track on the updated music page.

Today we are starting off our tutorial series. The plan is to give you detailed instruction on specific topics.

As you might have read, our orchestral template runs with Vienna Ensemble Pro. In this tutorial you will learn how to plan your template, what you need to put it into reality and how you do it in Logic Pro 9. If you are using another sequencer, this tutorial will be beneficial to you, too, as most things also apply to other applications.

Please give us feedback on this! The tutorial is intended to be extended according to your feedback, so keep it coming!

There is a large number of great software titles out there which seemingly noone has ever heard of.One of these is Independence Pro by a small German company called YellowTools.

We found this sampler pretty versatile and easy to use with a great factory library, so we’ll give you a short introduction to it.Maybe it could become the next secret weapon in your arsenal.

Independence Pro is largely unknown among musicians. The sample player with integrated library has a similar scope as Kontakt or Halion, but with a few nice touches.

The sampler itself is both fairly powerful and fairly standard. You can create zones to map your samples, edit instruments and many more things.

The great thing about Independence is it’s factory library, which weighs in at a hefty 70 GB. You get a selection of the Kirk Hunter Symphonic Orchestra (just like Kontakt uses a cut-down version of the VSL) and tons of other instruments. Particularly enjoyable are the guitars and drum kits. The keyboards leave quite a bit to desire, but the rest makes up for it.

Yellowtools have three special products using the Independence Engine: Culture, Majestic and Candy, featuring World Percussion, Basses and Saxophones, respectively. All these three special libraries are contained in Independence Pro! The Saxes are simply outstanding, as are the other libraries.

There is a free version available of the sampler, aptly titled Independence Free, so you can check it out without risk. Just head to Yellowtools and have a look! We really like Independence and can recommend it very much.